Next IMCL Conference Set to Share Frontier City Research and Solutions, as Call for Abstracts Enters Final Two Weeks

Submitted abstract topics to date include climate adaptation, ecology, regenerative planning and design, walkability and transportation choice, local identity, neuroscience, pattern languages, and the value of public markets; submissions have come from across the globe

ABOVE: The Call for Abstracts is still open for the 63rd International Making Cities Livable, and the Call will close at the end of February. For more information or to submit, please visit: https://www.imcl.online/cfa26

JELGAVA, LATVIA - The 63rd International Making Cities (IMCL) conference, in Riga and Jelgava, will focus on "Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption." Participants from across disciplines and national borders will gather to share peer-to-peer findings on the latest solutions to urban challenges, with a focus on the current time of geopolitical change -- and an examination of the lessons of historic disruptions and recoveries in Latvia and beyond.

The abstracts submitted to date for the conference, to be held July 6-10, 2026, include a broad representation of advanced scholars and city leaders from Europe, North America, China, India, Bangladesh, Zambia, and Australia. Topics addressed by abstracts submitted to date include:

• Climate adaptation

• Local identity and architecture

• New urban technology

• Pattern language (“Nested Resilient Patterns”)

• Walkability and street retrofits

• Neuroscience and urban mental health

• Neuroscience for school and healthcare building design

• Ecology, green building and quality of life

• Implementation pathways

• Regenerative zoning

• Regenerative mobility

• Regeneration in the Post-Soviet East Bloc

• Beauty and neuroscience

• Urban design methodologies

• Resilient housing and climate stress

• Transportation choice

• The value of public markets, and how to create them

Submissions are welcome from scholars, practitioners, city and NGO leaders, and may include new research, case studies, or new methodologies and their evaluations. The conference will focus on effective implementation strategies for making a new generation of more livable cities, towns and suburbs.

This year’s focus on “Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption” invites participants to look both backward and forward: to historic precedents of recovery in Europe and elsewhere, and to emerging models for regenerative development. How do cities recover from war, economic collapse, environmental damage, or technological upheaval—and how do they avoid rebuilding the same vulnerabilities? What does that mean today, for climate adaptation, resilience, and quality of life, as we face new disruptions? What does it mean to move beyond mitigation toward true regeneration, where urban systems can restore ecological health, social capital, and economic opportunity?

These are questions with immediate implications for effective policy and practice, and the conference provides a rare forum for sharing ideas in dialogue with scholars, practitioners, and city officials who are working directly on implementation.

For potential attendees and abstract submitters, IMCL offers a distinctive value proposition. Unlike larger trade-oriented conferences, IMCL emphasizes peer-to-peer exchange in a collegial, discussion-rich setting. Sessions are intentionally structured to allow substantive dialogue rather than rapid-fire presentation. This format has historically enabled collaborations that extend well beyond the conference itself—joint research projects, policy initiatives, and long-term professional networks. For emerging scholars, it is an opportunity to engage senior figures in an accessible setting. For practitioners and city leaders, it provides exposure to frontier research that can be translated into actionable policy and design strategies.

The geographic setting adds a further layer of relevance. Riga and Jelgava sit at the crossroads of Northern and Eastern Europe, shaped by centuries of cultural exchange, occupation, independence, and renewal. The Baltic region offers powerful lessons in post-disruption recovery, from post-war reconstruction to post-Soviet transition, and now to contemporary European integration amid new geopolitical pressures. Participants will have the opportunity not only to discuss resilience in abstract terms, but to experience it firsthand in urban form, public space, and civic life.

Riga’s celebrated Art Nouveau district, its UNESCO-listed Old Town, and its contemporary waterfront developments provide case studies in heritage preservation, adaptive reuse, and public realm design. Jelgava, with its historic palace complex and evolving civic center, offers a complementary setting for exploring smaller-city regeneration strategies, particularly relevant to cities navigating economic transition and demographic change. Site visits, workshops, walking discussions, and informal exchanges will allow participants to engage directly with the physical and institutional contexts that shape Baltic urban development.

The July timing further enhances the appeal. Early summer in Latvia offers maximum daylight hours, temperate weather, and vibrant public life in streets, parks, and markets — an ideal setting for experiential learning and study travel. Participants may wish to extend their visit to explore other Baltic cities such as Tallinn or Vilnius, or other parts of Scandinavia and northern Europe. They can examine first-hand the region's innovative and emerging models of mobility, landscape conservation, and heritage-led development. The conference is therefore not only a professional exchange, but a gateway to deeper study of a region that has undergone—and continues to undergo—profound transformation.

The IMCL was founded in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Crowhurst Lennard, a British architectural scholar. The Lennards met at the University of California, Berkeley, and the series they created there over forty years ago has become a premier international gathering of scholars, practitioners and city leaders, coming together across borders, sectors and disciplines to share the latest knowledge on effective solutions to today's urban challenges. The host organization, the non-profit Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, is currently based in the USA but has seen regular conference participants and prominent speakers from every continent except Antarctica.

The Call for Abstracts is open through the end of February. For researchers, practitioners, and civic leaders committed to regenerative urbanism, the coming weeks represent a final opportunity to contribute to what promises to be an especially timely and consequential gathering.

---

For more information about the 63rd IMCL conference, or to submit an abstract, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

From Vision to Code: Why Pattern Languages May Be the Crucial "Missing Middle" of Urban Implementation

The methodology pioneered by Christopher Alexander has transformed software, wiki and other fields; with key reforms, could it finally fulfill its promise for architecture and urbanism?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This blog post is part of a series of discussion topics leading to the 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia. July 6-10, 2026. Key colleagues of Christopher Alexander will be present to continue work on the pattern language methodology and related innovations.

In recent years, the idea of the “Missing Middle” has become a common point of reference in housing debates. Across North America and beyond, planners and policymakers are recognizing that a healthy housing ecosystem cannot be sustained by a polarized mix of detached single-family homes on one end and large apartment buildings on the other. A mix of sizes and types of units, once common in walkable neighborhoods, is increasingly understood as essential to affordability, diversity, and community life. In the USA, these often included duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, rowhouses, and other types.

Yet despite widespread agreement on the forms of this so-called "Missing Middle" housing, results on the ground remain uneven. Many well-intentioned reforms stall, produce marginal outcomes, or provoke backlash. This has led to a growing realization: the problem is not simply a shortage of housing types. It is a deeper failure in the process by which communities translate shared aspirations into workable rules.

The "Missing Middle" of Implementation

There is, in other words, another Missing Middle — one that sits upstream of buildings and blocks. It lies in the gap between community vision and the codes, standards, and policies that ultimately shape what gets built. Cities may articulate strong goals, like walkability, mixed use, livability, affordability... quality. Yet too often those goals dissolve as they move from plans to zoning text, from zoning to engineering standards, and from standards to development review. (Or from community preference to developer product, too often limited by the incentives, disincentives, barriers, and other risk profiles faced by the developer.) This is the terrain where good intentions are most often lost.

What is needed, to start, is greater upstream alignment on the goals, proactively forming a positive, achievable way forward, rather than a reacting negatively to a project that is already under way. That's what methodologies such as our own QUIMBY (short for QUality In My Back Yard) aim to do: focus on upstream alignment by building shared understanding and consent, before regulatory and project-level decisions harden into opposition and community polarization.

But even when communities succeed in articulating what they want, they still face a persistent question: How do we carry that intent, intact, into code and policy—following best practices rather than reinventing the wheel each time?

This question is increasingly being asked at the global scale as well. Through emerging collaborations with organizations such as UN-Habitat, cities across the globe are working to implement the New Urban Agenda—the United Nations’ framework for sustainable urban development that was adopted by all 193 member states. That's a very big deal: the world has reached agreement that we need better-quality urbanization, and more livable cities.

At its core, the New Urban Agenda promotes many of the same principles long championed by the International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) and by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and other long-standing and allied organizations: compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods; strong public spaces; social inclusion; and cities designed around shared human well-being rather than technocratic efficiency or specialist privilege.

The challenge, however, is familiar. Like the Charter of the New Urbanism, the New Urban Agenda is rich in values and aspirations; but translating those aspirations into everyday regulatory practice remains difficult. Without a reliable method for bridging vision and implementation, even the most widely endorsed frameworks risk remaining declarative rather than transformative.

What is now becoming clear, through applied work in cities large and small, is that addressing this upstream Missing Middle may be the single most important step cities can take to ensure that housing reform, public-space investment, and sustainability goals actually deliver the livable, equitable outcomes they promise.

Why Conventional Tools Fail at the Point of Translation

Most cities already possess an impressive array of planning tools: comprehensive plans, vision documents, corridor studies, form-based codes, overlays, design guidelines, and community engagement processes. Yet despite this sophistication, the same implementation failures recur with striking regularity.

The problem is not a lack of information, nor even a lack of public input. It is that most conventional tools are structurally brittle. Vision plans articulate values but stop short of operational guidance. Codes are legally precise but often disconnected from lived experience. Design guidelines are aspirational but optional, or so vague they are easily gamed. Each tool performs adequately within its own silo—yet meaning is steadily lost as ideas pass from one institutional handoff to the next.

This is why well-loved plans so often yield disappointing results. The planning document says “walkable, mixed-use, human-scaled,” but the zoning code still privileges separation of uses, excessive setbacks, and auto-oriented standards. Engineering manuals quietly override urban design goals. Development review becomes a box-checking exercise rather than a test of whether shared intentions are being met.

In short, the failure occurs not at the level of vision, but at the level of translation.

Patterns as the Missing Bridge Between Vision and Code

This is where pattern languages—originally developed by the architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure at UC Berkeley—offer a fundamentally different approach, and an enormous (if still largely unmet) promise.

The methodology has proven enormously useful in fields like software, engineering, user experience, agile development, wiki and wikipedia, and a remarkably diverse range of other fields. They capture practical, repeatable solutions in plain language and allow people to build complex systems step by step, learning and adapting as they go. They help teams share knowledge, avoid repeating mistakes, and improve systems over time without rigid top-down control.

In architecture and urban planning, by contrast, pattern languages were often misunderstood as fixed rulebooks or stylistic checklists, and were pushed aside by centralized planning and abstract regulations. That is beginning to change: growing evidence about health, sustainability, and quality of life—along with better digital tools and more participatory design methods—is reviving pattern languages as a powerful way to turn shared community values into places that are flexible, humane, and resilient.

What is especially useful in this context is that patterns operate at a crucial intermediate scale. They are neither abstract aspirations nor prescriptive regulations. Instead, they describe recurring relationships between human needs, spatial structure, and contextual conditions, expressed in a form that can guide many different implementations. A well-written pattern preserves intent while allowing adaptation.

This is what conventional tools lack. Pattern languages allow cities to say not just what they want, but how those qualities are reliably produced, without freezing solutions in place.

In practical terms, patterns can:

• Translate qualitative goals into testable design logic

• Inform zoning and code reform without dictating architectural style

• Provide continuity across political cycles and phased development

• Create a shared vocabulary among citizens, staff, consultants, and developers

Importantly, this approach aligns closely with the logic behind the QUIMBY (QUality In My Back Yard) methodology: building quality with communities, upstream, by making desired outcomes explicit, legible, and negotiable before conflict hardens around specific projects. Patterns do not replace democratic process; rather, they make it more effective by anchoring discussion in shared, evidence-based structures rather than abstractions.

What Applied Work Is Showing: Patterns in Practice

This is no longer a theoretical proposition. Over the past several years, pattern-based consulting has been applied successfully across a wide range of contexts, scales, and political environments, including in our own consulting work.

Working with the City of West Richland, Washington and citizen stakeholders, we used a custom-developed pattern language to translate community aspirations into code-ready guidance, helping city leaders align growth, walkability, and neighborhood character without resorting to rigid prescriptions. In several other cities, working for public agencies and private clients, we developed patterns to support planning and policy around livability and incremental development, creating a clearer path from shared vision to regulatory reform and on to entitled plan.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, we conducted a "mini-charrette" with stakeholders and professionals (as part of a CNU Congress) to develop pattern-based frameworks that informed corridor retrofit strategies. The patterns demonstrated how stakeholders could move beyond abstract concepts of “complete streets” and the like, toward concrete, place-specific guidance to integrate mobility, land use, and public life.

We have also used pattern methods internationally, to address challenges of resilience, climate adaptation and related challenges. In Saudi Arabia, we worked with the Center for Local Governance and several municipalities and state agencies to develop "a new pattern language for Saudi Cities," with patterns that addressed challenges as varied as thermal comfort in public space, walkability, and the design of socially supportive urban environments. The work confirmed to us that patterns can operate across cultures while remaining locally grounded.

ABOVE: Some of the patterns and pattern languages we have developed, including patterns for climate adaptation, thermal comfort, and urban resilience.

Across these cases, a consistent lesson emerges: when patterns are introduced upstream—before codes are rewritten or projects are proposed—implementation becomes faster, clearer, and less contentious. The work shifts from negotiating exceptions to aligning systems.

Why This Matters Now

As cities grapple with housing affordability, climate adaptation, public health, and social fragmentation, the temptation is to search for the next policy lever or design innovation. But the evidence increasingly suggests that the more urgent task is institutional: developing better tools for carrying shared intent into everyday decision-making.

Pattern languages, properly updated, operationalized, and embedded within contemporary governance, offer an especially promising path forward. To be sure, they are not a replacement for plans or codes, but they are the essential "connective tissue" that finally allows the regulations and policies to work effectively.

For organizations like the IMCL, committed to walkable, mixed-use, and livable cities, this represents a critical frontier: moving beyond advocacy toward repeatable, scalable implementation methods that cities can actually use.

ABOVE: A pattern language format that is designed to reside on a wiki, accessible from a smartphone. (This version was developed by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham.) Data-driven pattern languages offer a path to expanded capacity for scenario-modeling, visualization, monitoring and certification, and other complex planning tasks.

---

The 63rd International Making Cities Livable will take place in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026, with a significant track devoted to development of pattern languages and related insights. Other tracks will include urban resilience, climate-friendly planning, housing afforability, walkability, transportation choice, health and well-being, architectural quality and the edges of public space, and other frontier topics of city livability today. For more information, or to submit an abstract to join the conference as a presenter, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.

Why No Home Is An Island

Unpacking Fallacies and Realities in the Housing Affordability Debates

NOTE: This article is part of a series of discussion posts leading to the 63^rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference, July 6-10 in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia.

The housing debate in the USA, and to some extent in other countries, has a dominant refrain: build more homes, and prices will fall. That basic supply-and-demand logic animates the so-called Yes In My Back Yard or YIMBY movement, which has captured headlines and legislative momentum across the USA. But a recent Washington Post article, titled Are YIMBYs winning the housing wars? Not so fast, these people say, lays out a contrasting perspective. It cites scholars who argue that supply alone is not a magic bullet for affordability.

Underlying this debate is a fundamental disagreement -- and perhaps misunderstanding -- about what causes unaffordable housing and, consequently, what solutions will actually work. Misdiagnosing the problem leads to policies that might build more units, but do little to actually increase affordability. Not only could the specific cost of the units remain out of reach for too many, but the actual cost of living there (utilities, commuting, accessing daily needs) could reduce bottom-line monthly affordability for the residents. Worse, a narrow focus on supply risks obscuring broader social and urban needs, including social interaction, economic opportunity, ecological living, and overall quality of life. An "affordable" house in a remote, fragmented or unlivable locale is not an acceptable solution.

In its survey of the current housing affordability debate, The Washington Post underscores the rise of “supply skeptics” — analysts and academics who find evidence that simply deregulating land use and building more housing won’t materially lower costs for most. The article highlights research from Michael Storper, an urban planning professor at UCLA and the London School of Economics, who has become one of the most visible critics of the conventional YIMBY framing.

A recent paper by Storper and colleagues, titled, Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis, unpacks the fallacies of current supply-side thinking. First, they find that the “deregulationist” supply narrative is empirically weak. While high-cost regions are often more regulated, the authors show that this correlation does not translate into a strong causal relationship between zoning rules and overall housing supply. Across regions, housing construction has generally kept pace with household formation, even in supposedly “supply-constrained” metros. Upzoning may shift where housing gets built within a city, but the evidence does not support the claim that deregulation reliably increases regional supply enough to improve affordability. Selling deregulation as an affordability fix, they argue, is simply not supported by the data.

Second, the authors show that even when new market-rate housing is built, its impact on prices and affordability is modest and slow. The relationship between added supply and lower prices is far weaker than commonly assumed, with most credible estimates showing that prices respond only slightly to increases in housing stock. The popular idea of “filtering”—where new luxury units eventually become affordable to lower-income households—turns out to be sluggish, uneven, and in many high-demand cities, reversed altogether. Housing prices depreciate very slowly, land values often rise, and in many cases older units “filter up” to wealthier residents. The net result is that new construction does little to ease rent burdens for households already struggling.

Third, to test the strongest possible version of the supply argument, the paper simulates an extreme construction boom—and finds it still fails. Even under highly optimistic assumptions—sustained, above-historic growth in housing supply, generous price elasticities, and fast filtering—it would take decades for rents in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York to become affordable to non-college workers. More realistic assumptions push that timeline into the better part of a century, requiring implausibly large expansions of the housing stock. The takeaway is stark: we cannot plausibly deregulate and build our way out of the affordability crisis with market-rate housing alone, at least not on any timescale relevant to today’s households.

Fourth, the authors argue that housing markets are not “broken” on the supply side at all—they are responding normally to demand shaped by inequality. Over the past forty years, housing costs have tracked average income growth remarkably closely across all kinds of regions, from superstar coastal cities to Sunbelt metros and even shrinking Rust Belt areas. The problem is that income growth has been radically unequal. Wages for college-educated workers—who increasingly cluster in large, high-amenity cities—have surged, while wages for non-college workers have stagnated. As prices follow average incomes upward, a widening wedge opens between housing costs and the earnings of those at the bottom. In this view, today’s affordability crisis is best understood not as a failure to build enough housing, but as the predictable outcome of rising interpersonal and spatial inequality in the American economy.

Toward a Holistic Housing Strategy

If we accept that housing affordability is a multidimensional problem, then our solutions must be multidimensional as well.

• Increase Diverse Supply: Yes — but not just more units. We need a range of housing types targeted to different income levels and life stages, from affordable rentals to starter homes to adaptable multigenerational units. And we need them in the right places.

• Rationalize Regulations: Streamline processes that add cost without adding value, eliminate arbitrary barriers such as excessive minimum parking, and prioritize predictable timelines.

• Land and Infrastructure Strategies: Public acquisition of strategic land, tax policies that discourage land speculation, and investment in infrastructure (especially transit) can unlock areas for more equitable development.

• Construction Strategies: Exploit (and incentivize) economies of construction, including manufacturing and mobile homes (yes, they still have a place, when well-designed).

• Finance and Subsidies: Expand programs that subsidize low-income housing, support first-time buyers, and enable community land trusts and shared-equity models.

• Engage Communities: Build consent and collaboration through genuine public engagement, equitable planning processes, and respect for community voices.

• Think Regionally: Housing markets are regional, not local. Solutions must consider labor markets, transportation networks, and demographic trends beyond municipal borders.

What does this mean for policy and practice? The first implication is not that housing supply is irrelevant—but that it has been dramatically oversold as a cure-all. Storper and colleagues are careful to say that supply does matter: adding housing can slow price growth, improve access to opportunity-rich places, reduce emissions, and support regional productivity. But the evidence makes clear that supply alone—especially market-rate supply unlocked through deregulation—is not a silver bullet for affordability. When demand is driven by deep income inequality and spatial sorting, prices will continue to outrun the incomes of many households no matter how many units we permit. Treating zoning reform as the solution risks mistaking a contributing factor for the core disease.

The deeper lesson is that housing affordability is a systemic problem, not a single-variable one. It sits at the intersection of labor markets, income distribution, land prices, construction costs, finance, infrastructure, and governance—and it is amplified by geography. If rising inequality is pushing demand faster at the top than incomes can grow at the bottom, then affordability cannot be restored without either changing those income dynamics or insulating households from them. That means bringing housing policy back into conversation with wage policy, workforce development, tax and transfer systems, and long-term public investment in non-market and permanently affordable housing. Supply reforms can play a role—but only as part of a broader system reset.

This is where upstream action becomes essential. Rather than framing housing as a zero-sum battle between NIMBY obstruction and YIMBY deregulation, an upstream "QUIMBY" approach -- short for QUality In My Back Yard -- focuses on building shared value structures earlier in the process: aligning residents, developers, cities, and institutions around win-win outcomes. That includes well-located housing tied to daily needs, mobility, and services; building types that reduce construction cost rather than escalate it; regulatory streamlining paired with clear public benefits; and mechanisms that stabilize land costs and expectations before speculative pressures take hold. Upstream buy-in, predictable rules, and pattern-based implementation are not obstacles to affordability—they are prerequisites for it.

Conclusion: No Home Is an Island

The impulse to reduce housing affordability to a silver-bullet solution — from supply alone, or deregulation alone — is understandable but misplaced. Market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, community values, and public policy all intersect in shaping housing outcomes. As The Washington Post article and Storper’s research remind us, simplistic narratives can mislead and marginalize the people most in need of real solutions. We need systemic, toolkit approaches -- not silver bullets, but what some have called "silver buckshot".

Just as no house stands apart from its neighborhood, no policy succeeds in isolation. It’s time for a more holistic, evidence-informed, and humane conversation about housing — one that acknowledges complexity, respects people’s lived experience, and pursues affordability not as an end in itself, but as a necessary component of vibrant, equitable, livable cities, towns and suburbs.

----

EDITOR'S NOTE: The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) will be held in the beautiful cities of Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. For more information or to submit an abstract -- on housing affordability, or other topics of livability, sustainability and quality of life, please visit https://www.imcl.online/latvia.